Dec. 4, 2006 – Page 3206
The Department of Homeland Security is the home of many mysteries. There is, of course, the color-coded system for gauging the threat of an attack. And there is the department database of national assets to protect against a terrorist threat, which includes Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo in Woodville, Ala., and the Apple and Pork Festival in Clinton, Ill.
And now Jim O’Brien, the director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in Clark County, Nev., has discovered another hard-to-fathom DHS notion: a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target — an all-important estimate outside the Beltway, because greater slices of the federal anti-terrorism pie go to the locations with the highest scores. Overall, the department awarded $711 million in high-risk urban counterterrorism grants last year.
O’Brien took an active interest in how the government runs its risk-assessment numbers when the department announced this year that it was downgrading Las Vegas from among the highest-risk urban centers to the lowest 25 percent grouping of such potential targets.
That shift put Las Vegas on what’s called a “sustainment” line of funding, which represents a loss of more than $700,000 in federal counterterrorism money. The city — the population center of Clark County — previously had placed among higher risk targets thanks to its highly visible skyline and the vast complement of tourists it attracts.
As O’Brien reviewed the risk-assessment formulas — a series of calculations that runs into the billions — he found himself unable to account for several factors, the terrorist-intent notion principal among them. “I have a Ph.D. I think I understand formulas,” he says. “Take the square root of terrorist intent? Now, give me a break.” The whole notion, O’Brien says, is a contradiction in terms: “How can you quantify what somebody is thinking?”
Other designations for variables in the formula are almost befuddling, O’Brien says, such as the “attractiveness factor,” which seeks to establish how terrorists might prefer one sort of target over another, and the “chatter factor,” which tries to gauge the intent of potential terror plotters based on communication intercepts.
“One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure,” he says. “So I don’t know how you measure attractiveness.” The chatter factor, meanwhile, leaves O’Brien entirely in the dark: “I’m not sure what that means.”
The DHS undersecretary for preparedness, George W. Foresman, offered no specific comment on the calculations beyond saying that he only knows of “chatter” as a term used in the intelligence community. Foresman argues that the larger point of the risk assessment is that “the math informs the knowledge. The math is but one component of a process that involves common sense, gut instinct and quantitative measures.”
O’Brien has other criticisms of Vegas’ downgrade that don’t involve a graphing calculator. DHS reported this year that the Las Vegas region was not home to any military bases, though Nellis Air Force Base hugs the city line. O’Brien also says the 2006 assessment made no mention of Hoover Dam — a critical asset — which is a mere 25 miles from the Vegas strip.
None of this inspires much confidence, O’Brien says, in how DHS arrives at its risk assessment. “Holy smokes. If you’re relying on the soundness of a calculation that involves millions of arithmetical activities, who checked the accuracy to insure that some little tweak over here isn’t throwing the whole thing off?”
The department caught a lot of flak this spring when it announced its funding decisions, particularly because of cuts to New York City, which was, after all, the location of the most death and destruction Sept. 11, 2001. As a result, senior officials, including Secretary
It remains to be seen if Las Vegas will be considered a high-threat urban area in the new year. But Foresman says 2007’s grant calculations and risk calculations will highlight “transparency and customer service.”
Which is not to say, technically, that terrorist intent is not a bean that can’t be counted. John Rollins, a counterterrorism expert who was the former chief of staff of the department’s intelligence unit, says equations can be devised to represent terrorist intent. But he also cautions that any such equation needs to come from very reliable human intelligence. And how about dividing that intent into a square root? “I don’t know what the hell that’s all about,” he says.